“I have a client’s machine running Windows XP Professional SP1, 256MB DDR2700, and 20GB drive. He doesn’t have all that much on the machine, other than Office 2000, but when I run the Windows Disk Cleanup utility, it runs and runs and runs (I stopped it after 45 minutes!) There is no apparent drive activity after the first few minutes, but it gets stuck at “Scanning: Compress old files” and never seems to progress from there. The Task Manager shows 100% CPU Usage” and the cleanmgr.exe is running at a steady 98%.

I wanted to run disk cleanup and defrag before installing Service Pack 2, but don’t know how to get around this cleanup problem.

By the way, I even tried booting to Safe Mode, Command Prompt, and running cleanmgr.exe from there, but the result was the same.”